The Daily Telegraph - Features
After all the speculation, Prince Harry showed up – to a mixed reception
His flying visit raised eyebrows – here, two Telegraph writers give differing views:
The Duke of Sussex came under duress and looked like a surly teenager
As Prince Harry made his way down the aisle in Westminster Abbey, I wondered who he reminded me of. Then it came: the royal renegade had the expression and gait of a teenager who’d recently disgraced himself at a family occasion, necking a bottle of port and telling auntie Mabel she looked like a horse, before throwing up on the carpet.
Like that teen, Harry had agreed to attend the big family “do” under duress. But he wasn’t apologising for his actions, hence the slightly bowed head, set jaw and defiant demeanour. Had the 38-year-old expat been able to chew gum, one imagines he might have been masticating furiously... in the third row, where he couldn’t have looked like more of a “spare” had a woman in a large, feathered hat not immediately seated herself in front, obliterating him from public view. Which the Princess Royal promptly did.
That was a bit naughty of the Prince of Wales, wasn’t it? We know you’re cross, Wills, and rightly so, but bribing the Coronation committee seating planners? Still, Princess Anne and her superyacht-sized military blockade of a hat did the job nicely. From certain camera angles, it looked like Harry’s face had been scrubbed out with red Crayola, and on Twitter it was generally agreed to be “top trolling”.
Conspiracy theorists will probably insist this was no coincidence.
If it was indeed deliberate, and the Duke does attend any future royal events, the Palace will have to get awfully inventive with guests and their bonnets. I’d urge them to send Marge Simpson that “save the date” in plenty of time.
The hat incident wasn’t the only indignity for Prince Harry, however. Worse still, whereas he is no longer permitted to wear royal robes, the Duke of York turned up wearing his lavish formal Order of the Garter attire. This despite Andrew having no formal ceremonial role, being a nonworking royal and, you know, generally beneath the Duke of Sussex in every “most disgraceful royal” poll.
If this suggested a softening of the King’s approach to his errant younger brother, the Duke of Sussex can’t have failed to get the hint the moment he laid eyes on his uncle.
Throughout the ceremony, the surly teenage thought bubble above Prince Harry’s head read: “I’m only playing along with this circus because I have to. As soon as it’s over, I’m getting the hell out of Dodge. Not so much of a fly-by, as a ‘hi-bye’.”
As soon as the Sussexes issued a clipped statement saying the Duke would be attending his father’s Coronation alone, it was clear this visit would be brief. And alone, Prince Harry appeared to be flailing.
When sources confirmed he would be “in and out of the UK in 24 hours”, to be back in Los Angeles for Prince Archie’s 4th birthday celebrations, I, for one, balked.
I frequently do that London-LA trip (admittedly, never as a 24-hour round trip because I’m not clinically insane) – it’s brutal. After flying in on a commercial flight that landed late on Friday morning, Prince Harry will either have started the day of the Coronation at 2am, perhaps ordering jet-lagged food combinations from the kitchen at Frogmore (where he stayed one final night, reportedly), or spent it woozy from his sleeping tablet.
That Prince Harry only confirmed after the RSVP date of April 3 had passed wasn’t just indicative of the torturous conversations that must have taken place between husband and wife, but characteristically graceless. For hosts, the next best thing to a “yes” is a quick “no”, and these two seemed determined to do things the hard way.
Every time I caught a partial glimpse of Harry’s face behind that quivering red feather and felt something resembling sympathy for this lost boy, I remembered that, and the way he worked his way through almost every member of his own family in Spare, targeting everyone from his brother and sister-in-law to his father and “dangerous” “villain” of a stepmother.
If reports that the Duke did not meet with his father or brother during his brief stay in the UK are true, then Saturday was the first time he has been in the same room as any of them. So, yes, it was always going to be uncomfortable. Just how uncomfortable is measurable by the fact the father-of-two would rather be at his son’s fourth birthday party, back in Montecito (which the time difference makes possible), than spend more than a couple of hours in their company.
Think about that. Think about a dozen sugar-drunk preschoolers tackling each other to the ground, the grating Captain America party entertainer, the screaming and the wailing. Think about how uniquely stressful your own children’s parties are. Then think of the relief on Prince Harry’s face when he realised that the Coronation clashed with Prince Archie’s birthday. An iron-clad get-out if ever there were one.
Despite the jet lag, Prince Harry is bound to enjoy this party more than most. I imagine him sitting with a paper crown on his head and a blissed-out smile on his face, right up until that party entertainer suggests a game of Grandmother’s Footsteps.
It takes strength to walk through Westminster Abbey balancing a five-pound crown made of solid gold on your head – but it takes a particularly special kind of fortitude to make that journey in just a simple black morning suit, knowing that most of the 2,000-strong congregation are watching your every move and waiting to see you stumble.
All eyes were on the Duke of Sussex as he arrived for his father’s Coronation, but if the 38-year-old was feeling the pressure, he was damned if he was going to show it. As he made his way into the Abbey, only the medals on his collar hinting at his decade of service in the armed forces, Prince Harry made a point of grinning and nodding at various members of the congregation as if he hadn’t a care in the world, or a recently released memoir under his belt. A chance visitor from outer space would have glanced at proceedings and had no idea of the months of fevered speculation about his attendance.
Body language experts and lip-readers were drafted in, en masse, to try to reveal something scandalous from the Duke’s briefest of visits to the UK. Perhaps mindful of this, Buckingham Palace had seated him slap bang behind his aunt, the Princess Royal, who was wearing a giant hat complete with exotic red feather, the plumage of which blocked almost all view of his face.
There was another impediment to staring at the Prince, given that he had been placed three rows back, next to Jack Brooksbank, the husband of Princess Eugenie, and Princess Alexandra, a cousin of Elizabeth II who hasn’t had a royal engagement in more than a decade. “He isn’t a working member of the royal family,” came the refrain, again and again, from officials at Buckingham Palace, as they explained this punitive seating plan.
A working royal he may not be, but Prince Harry will always be the King’s youngest son, his “darling boy”. It seemed petty, then, to welcome the Duke as if he were a
The Duke has had a lifetime of coaching on how to appear in public as if all is well
distant relative, especially when you consider his crime: standing up for his wife when he felt nobody else would.
Much has been made of the Duchess of Sussex’s decision to stay at home in Montecito, with one tabloid recently running a front-page splash shaming her for doing so. The narrative of the lone Duke has not been helped by images of him walking solo down the nave of the abbey, flanked by his cousins and their husbands. But the truth is that the Duke and Duchess of Sussex’s marriage is as strong as ever, with Harry determined to do everything in his power to protect the mother of his children from the dreadful pain she felt back in 2019, when she said that endless negative press attention left her feeling suicidal.
Sadly, the media narrative has changed little since then, with recent headlines suggesting that the Duchess’s current quietness is because she is busy behind the scenes trying to launch her own brand. The truth is a little less exciting than that: the only thing that the Duchess is trying to do right now is protect her mental health, by keeping a low profile.
Is it any surprise, then, that the Duchess chose not to throw herself into the lion’s den of the Coronation? That, on the day of her son’s fourth birthday, she felt a better use of her time would be to stay in the safe haven of her California home, where she could concentrate fully on Prince Archie and Princess Lilibet, and the lovely life they have created away from prying eyes? And yet despite her physical absence, Prince Harry went into the Abbey with the full support of his wife behind him.
He managed that well, in trying circumstances that few of us would fancy being tested under. Broad smiles and impassive faces were the order of the day – Prince Harry has, after all, had a lifetime of coaching on how to appear in public as if all is well. And yet it must have been bittersweet for the Duke to be apart from his first-born child on his birthday, while watching his nephew, Prince George act as page boy alongside the new Queen’s grandchildren, Gus and Louis Lopes and Freddy Parker Bowles, and her great-nephew, Arthur Elliott. Spare indeed.
As ever, Princesses Beatrice and Eugenie were there to support their beloved cousin. There had been talk of Prince Harry perhaps making the family lunch, an invitation extended by the King as an apparent “olive branch”. But that peace offering was surely only ever about optics, with the team at Buckingham Palace knowing full well the Duke’s priority was getting back to the US to see his son so he could wish him a happy birthday in person.
And so by the time that the new King and Queen stepped on to the Buckingham Palace balcony to watch the fly-past, Harry was already on his way to Heathrow, to catch a plane back to California. There, he could carry out his most important duty of the day: that of a dad tucking his son into bed, on the joyous occasion of his fourth birthday.
It took guts to walk in alone – it was petty to treat him like a distant relative